Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.

- Twain, Mark

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

My rackets are run on strictly American lines and they're going to stay that way.

Capone, Al

Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes

Will, George F.

A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.

Twain, Mark

A burglar who respects his art always takes his time before taking anything else.

Porter, O. Henry

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

There are crimes which become innocent and even glorious through their splendor, number and excess.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

10.

The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you.

Miller, Henry

11.

Save a thief from the gallows and he will cut your throat.

Proverb, French

12.

The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the outlaw, the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order.

Foucault, Michel

13.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

Mencken, H. L.

14.

All, all is theft, all is unceasing and rigorous competition in nature; the desire to make off with the substance of others is the foremost -- the most legitimate -- passion nature has bred into us and, without doubt, the most agreeable one.

Sade, Marquis De

15.

He has 63 ways of getting money, the most common and most honorable ones being stealing, thieving, and robbing.

Rabelais, Francois

16.

Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.

Genet, Jean

17.

It is certain that stealing nourishes courage, strength, skill, tact, in a word, all the virtues useful to a republican system and consequently to our own. Lay partiality aside, and answer me: is theft, whose effect is to distribute wealth more evenly, to be branded as a wrong in our day, under our government which aims at equality? Plainly, the answer is no.

Sade, Marquis De

18.

The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness.

Canetti, Elias

19.

Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it.

Genet, Jean

20.

Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it's intimate and psychological -- resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

21.

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.

Doctorow, E. L.

23.

Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.

Wells, H.G.

24.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

25.

The greatest crime in the world is not developing your potential. When you do what you do best, you are helping not only yourself, but the world.

Williams, Roger

26.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

27.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

28.

A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.

Scott, Howard

29.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

30.

Every rascal is not a thief, but every thief is a rascal.

Aristotle

31.

Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.

Kraus, Karl

32.

He that is robbed, not wanting what is stolen, let him not know't, and he's notrobbed at all

Shakespeare, William

33.

Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

Connolly, Cyril

34.

The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

35.

Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

Waugh, Evelyn

36.

Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions.

Christie, Agatha

37.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

38.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

39.

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of the pleasure that concealed it.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

Crime expands according to our willingness to put up with it.

Farber, Barry J.

41.

Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us.

Bataille, Georges

42.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

43.

The truth of the matter is that muggers are very interesting people.

Winner, Michael

44.

There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.

Durkheim, Emile

45.

Many a man is saved from being a thief by finding everything locked up.

Howe, Edgar Watson

46.

We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.

Ellis, Havelock

47.

Abscond. To move in a mysterious way, commonly with the property of another.

Bierce, Ambrose

48.

He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.

Plato

49.

The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.

Boorstin, Daniel J.

50.

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

Camus, Albert